Deepwater Horizon - One Year On

Thursday marked the one year
anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster. 11 rig workers were
killed and 16 injured in the initial explosion. And, after nearly 5 million barrels of oil spewed in to the ocean for five months, the long term effects on the Gulf of Mexico are still being uncovered.

BP and the US
government say the area is clean, after using dangerous dispersant chemicals to
break up oil on the surface and releasing hydrocarbon-eating bacteria into the
ocean.

Yet, below the sanitised
surface, oil cakes the sea bed, is embedded in the ecosystem and lies hidden
under the sand. Finally, from behind the PR machine a darker, stickier mess is
emerging – the subject of new Greenpeace report: Deepwater Horizon One Year On.

The Gulf of Mexico
today

Beaches remain closed
across the Louisiana coast: the black slick may have gone, but tar balls – from
the BP spill, but also others – litter the white sands. Grand Isle State Park beach in
Louisiana is covered with weathered blobs of oil, as witnessed by Ed
Crooks for
the Financial Times.

From the initial
explosion to present day, the document highlights how the size and impact of
the spill, plus fate of the oil and ecosystem, was downplayed by both the oil
industry and the Obama administration:

‘At no stage did BP or the Coast
Guard conduct accurate measurements of the amount of oil emanating from the
broken riser pipe. This decision meant any assessment of the spill’s ultimate
size had to be inferred and put BP in a position where it could challenge any
final figure as an over-estimate, and thus seek to reduce the amount of any
fine it would have to pay.'

Funding and Finding the Facts

In the section Determining
Impacts, the report describes how our ship Arctic Sunrise spent two months
in the Gulf, acting as a base for researchers to study the impact on the area –
and beyond. On board were some of the US scientists studying sponges, plankton,
whales, ocean chemistry plus the organisms living in, and on, the sea floor. And,
while research is still being concluded, anomalous observations point to oil
and or dispersant chemicals notably contaminating the food chain.

'In March 2011, a paper in the journal Conservation Biology concluded
that total mortality of dolphins and whales as a result of the spill may have
been 50 times higher than the original estimate, and that as many as 5,050 may
have been killed, out of sight.

Worryingly, all research has to
be approved – which has led to a cover up:

'Some researchers who were contracted by the National Marine
Fisheries Service (NMFS) to document the increased mortality and to collect
samples for analysis complained that they were instructed in a letter from the
agency that “no data or findings may be released, presented or discussed ...
without prior approval” and that they had privately admonished by federal
officials for ‘speaking out of turn” to the media.'

The National
Commission

You’d think after such
a devastating environmental catastrophe – which many believe to be the worst in
US history – the US government would want to make sure such a disaster never
happened again.

The Deepwater Horizon post the explosion, before it sunk to the sea bed

The Commission’s findings were
published in January 2011, and found that in the rush to extract oil as quickly
as possible safety was neglected:

‘The Deepwater Horizon disaster exhibits the costs of a culture
of complacency ...There are recurring themes of missed warning signals, failure
to share information, and a general lack of appreciation for the risks involved
... But that complacency affected government as well as industry.’

In December 2010, a
month before the Commission report was published, the US stopped offshore
drilling off the Atlantic coast and eastern Gulf of Mexico – until at least
2017, due to the US ‘experience
with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.'

The Future

While drilling in the Gulf of
Mexico was put on hold, there were no limits on deep water drilling in the new frontier of the Arctic waters off Greenland, where the oil industry has been eagerly awaiting the results of exploratory drilling there.

Deepwater Horizon One Year On highlights how this new territory could be even more
hazardous than the Gulf of Mexico in event of a spill, due to both the Arctic’s
extreme climate, remote location and the industry’s complacency and
lack of research.

Freezing temperatures, 10 to 30 foot waves and
hurricane-strength winds would make finding slicks beyond challenging – and the
remoteness of Arctic locations means reaction times to a disaster difficult and
slow. Current computer models also can’t predict how arctic ice would react to
a spill – or the effects on species like walruses, polar bears and others.

Despite the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe still unraveling in familiar
waters, the oil industry’s thirst for liquid hydrocarbons is sending them into
alien waters – still unresearched.

Reports of drills re-opening in the Gulf of Mexico as early as
July this year have appeared in the UK media – while local communities remain
shattered, businesses bankrupt, the environment devastated plus the corporate
giant facing manslaughter charges for the deaths of 11 rig workers.